Met with electrician on site #3

I was asked to come on site again to confirm the positioning and height of our front foyer wall lighting, and this time saw a lot of cables criss-crossing in wall and ceiling cavities throughout the house already. The frames for switchplates are installed on the wall, as well as frames for powerpoint faceplates, and I could almost visualise the inside of our new house and how we would place our furniture.

Met with electrician on site #2

I met with a couple of workers for our electrician to go over finer details of the placements of switches, power points, data cables, etc.

Met electrician on site to go over electrical plan

We had an on-site meeting with the electrician who is subcontracting for our builder. They can also install light fixtures and connect up data cables after hand over from the builder (we didn't have that included in the contract with builder as they will charge a premium for that), so I have asked them to give us a quote on those bits that are not included in the contract with our builder. If the same electrician can do the wiring and the connection/fitting of lighting and data cables it would save us the hassle of hiring and explaining things twice. 

We have decided to go with LED down lights all throughout the house. The initial cost will be more than with regular down lights but we had to have our front foyer down lights in energy efficient light fitting for BASIX compliance anyway, so we thought we might as well go the whole hog and have LED down lights throughout the house. The light cast by LED and regular down lights are different visually, so we didn't want part of the house to have different look to the other parts. 

We will also have fairly extensive data cable network throughout the house for TV, Foxtel, video/audio files stored on NAS devices, as well as phone and internet which will all be connected up to a Hub that we will place under the staircase in the centre of the house. To that end we have four data cables each going into our lounge room, kids' playroom, home theatre, and master bedroom. The minor bedrooms (kids' and guests') will have two Cat6 data cables going in to each room. We are planning to have a video feed coming from the security camera placed at the front of the house to go through the hub and be accessible to each room (just so we can see who is out at the front of the house without having us actually walk up to the front window).

Click to view larger image of electrical plan.

Bathroom fittings

After thinking about if for a while, we have decided to change our ensuite bathroom layout. Originally we chose to go with Option 2 of what the colour consultant suggested, but we have gone back to her and told her that we would like Option 1 instead now.

Our original choice: Option 2

Now changed our mind to: Option 1

Now the bath will be at the end of the room taking up the whole east wall, and the vanity (although it had to be shrunk back from 180cm to 150cm length) will be in the middle of the room, which will have more natural light when you look at yourself in the mirror. Sadly we can't increase the window size back to 150cm now, as we submitted documents to council with a 90cm window. We'll probably put a few glass shelves to the left of the window to balance out that wall. Shower will be slightly bigger (120x90cm before, 130x100cm now) too.

Part of the reason we went with option 2 originally was because we didn't want to reduce the walk-in-robe space. Now that we are going with option 1 we have less WIR, but with that sacrifice we hope we gained more useable layout in the ensuite. The shower is noticeably bigger which is great, and the bath and its surround will be a nice spot to place decorative objects and orchids.

Ensuite Bathroom Fittings

150cm bathtub with tile surround

150cm caeserstone vanity top with darker laminate doors

Floating vanity

130 x 100 cm shower (semi-frameless)

Family (Kids') Bathroom Fittings

170cm bathtub with tile surround

120cm caeserstone vanity top with darker laminate doors

Floating vanity

110 x 90 cm shower (semi-frameless)

Bathroom tiles are to be chosen later, but we are thinking white large wall tiles and brown/grey 30 x 30 cm floor tiles (budget permitting).

Colour and Material Selection appointment

We had another appointment with the builder's colour consultant today. We have decided on the internal colours and fittings for doors, trims, and bathrooms.

Colours
Entry foyer with raked ceiling: Taubmans "Princess Bling" (3 coats) - It's white, but not clinical white. Should brighten up the foyer and emphasise the tall ceiling and the feeling of open space in our entry hallway.

Walls throughout the house: Taubmans "Ocean Pebble" - It's a neutral, mushroomy beige.

Feature 5m wall in vestibule: Taubmans "Colonial P196-N4" - It's darker than Ocean Pebble but in the same tone. We plan to light up this wall with spotlight, and dress it with lots of black & white photos in white picture frames.

Skirting, architrave, window frame: Taubmans "Stoney Brook" - It's  an off-white colour, and is a lighter version of Ocean Pebble.

Ceilings and cornices: White

Fittings
Front door: Corinthian Infinity INFWS8G Pivot Door (1200 x 2340 mm) and side lights. Glass glazing is "Translucent" which is not transparent.

Front door lock: Gainsborough Angular Trilock BC in Bright Chrome finish.

Laundry door: Corinthian Backdoor Style TH7 (standard height). Glass glazing is "Obscure". Painted.

All internal doors are plain hollow core doors, which we are not completely happy about, as we wanted solid core doors for minimising sound. We will need to install taller doors for our Ground and Lower Ground floors, and we would have had to custom order the style of doors we liked to make them taller. So we've decided to go with standard hollow core doors at this time, to keep the budget blowup to a reasonable level. Doors are relatively easy to change later by ourselves if we really can't live with noise coming through doors.

Internal door handles: Gainsborough Carla Lever in Satin Chrome finish.

Kitchen appointment next week!

We have our kitchen appointment next week. Mrs Sasanqua has been doing research on the colours and materials, as well as placement of appliances in our new kitchen. We will see how much upgrade we can afford. Our kitchen is not very big (about 4m by 3.2m) but we will have the butler's pantry (about 2.1m by 4.5m) off our main kitchen, so storage should not be a problem we hope.

Here are a few sketches we did with our 3D mockup program.

Kitchen viewed from living entry.

Kitchen viewed from TV area. That pillar on island bench is structural and need to be there, but we don't like it!

Kitchen island viewed from dining area, doorway to the right is butler's pantry.

Kitchen island viewed from buttler's pantry entry.

Inside butler's pantry. Window, full cupboards, and large sink.

Bathrooms layout

The colour consultant also gave us some suggestions on our bathroom and ensuite designs. We hadn't thought much on the layout of our bathrooms and left them as the draftsman drew them. The colour consultant gave us a couple of suggestions for the layout for us to choose from, and we decided on:

Main Bathroom

Ensuite

We are a little concerned about the closeness of shower and toilet in our ensuite but until we can come up with something else we will go with this layout.

Building contract signed

A few versions of house plan and tender updates later, our sales consultant came out to our house again for the occasion, and we signed our building contract on 26 May 2011.

We did read the fine points in the contract carefully prior to signing and had a couple of clauses changed to our liking. We paid the 5% deposit of the tender price. This was the first payment (except for the survey report) to our builder in the 4 months of our planning stage.

House design revisions

February, March, & April 2011 - We revised and fine-tuned the house plan, sometimes changing things based on our sales consultant's advise or on costing, sometimes based on what we read on internet forums.

We were originally going to have the house rendered, and have hardwood flooring throughout the house. But due to cost blowout we had to make a compromise somewhere and choose between (a) have tiles instead of floorboard downstairs, or (b) have smoothfaced bricks (sales consultant's suggestion) instead of render. In the end we decided to keep the hardwood flooring throughout (tiles are so cold and we take shoes off in the house), and give up the render. Hopefully the smoothfaced bricks will look streamlined and smooth as we were told, but if we are very unhappy about the bricks we can always have them rendered 5 or 10 years later when we can.

Another thing we had to give up was the skylight in the pitched roof in the foyer. Because of the direction the roof is facing, if we were to put a skylight in it would have been visible from the street on the roof above the front door. We really liked the idea of having a very high pitched ceiling filled with natural light in the entrance foyer, but instead we will have to put in lots of lights there, and hope that will still give us the WOW factor.

We went back and forth, did a lot of research because we didn't want to change anything major further down the build process. During this time a new survey report and bushfire report were done. Our sales consultant was helpful and communication was very good on email and phone, we also had a meeting at our house and picked his brain for ideas and recommendations. We took our time in getting the house plan the way we wanted, and quite enjoyed this process.

What the house will have:

• Nice open entry hall with high racked ceiling
• Large butler's pantry off the kitchen with window and sink
• High ceiling on lower levels
• Open plan living leading out to alfresco area at the back
• 4 bedrooms, study, media room, open plan kitchen/living/dining room, play room
• Main bathroom, ensuite bathroom, powder room
• 2.5-car garage (storage/workshop)
• Landscaped garden
• Swimming pool
• Polished floorboard throughout except wet areas

New builder

We went out to Homeworld at Kellyville on a Saturday and spoke with a Sales Consultant at H's office. We had our contour survey reports from our dealings with the previous builder, so took that along. Discussed what features we wanted in our house design, and using their Monash design as a template, drew in a lot of modifications to their plan while we were there. Because we previously already had a custom house design made by another builder, we knew what layout worked for us, so in the end our modified Monash plan looked very similar to our old builder's custom design.

Downstairs and Foyer levels sketch

The sales consultant seemed to know what he was talking about. We were explained how the process of building with them would go, and we asked a lot of questions, which were mostly answered on the spot, others were answered in subsequent email and phone communications. We were promised a mock up of the proposed floor plan to be emailed to us in the following week, which we got. We were told that a lot of upgraded finishings were displayed in their new Avalon house at Oran Park so we drove all the way there the following weekend to look at them, and to have another meeting at their office there with the same sales consultant. Based on the brief we provided, a draft tender was submitted to us for review. The price looked doable, in fact it was about $70K less than the previous builder, and we were going to get larger family/living areas. However we were well aware that there would be additional extras if/when we upgrade features and fittings later on. Thus our relationship with our new builder began.

Our Story

We bought our old house in Sydney's north in 2006, umm'ed and ahh'ed about renovating it (circa 1952) or rebuilding, but decided in late 2009 that we would look into knock down and rebuild. In early 2010, we had a local small building firm custom design our new house and submit tender for it, but at the time our budget didn't quite extend to having that design built in the way we wanted it to, without compromising too much on the quality and features in the new house, while maintaining our lifestyle comfortably. Also around the same time we found out that we were expecting our baby no.2, so the house rebuild project was put on hold until the baby project was done.

Fast forward a good few months, after baby no.2 arrived, in February 2011 we decided to restart our rebuild project, and this time looked at some project homes to see what bigger builders had to offer. We had nothing against the original builder we talked to, they were nice people and their process was efficient, so we could have gone back to them (after all we spent $6000 to have that design drawn) but we wanted to see what was out there. Custom build is great as the customer has freedom to choose anything as long as they can afford it, but at the same time that same freedom can be a bit of a burden when you don't know exactly what you want sometimes, especially if you haven't built a house before.

As our plot is sloping down towards the back, not many project home designs were suitable but we decided to go with H's Monash split level design, heavily modified to suit our needs.